December Salon – with Leila Johnston and Sinead McDonald

Sinead and Leila will be bringing a selection of their current research to the Salon. Sinead’s time-themed residency in Dublin has her experimenting with clocks and ideas about bodily time – and Leila’s work at London dance company Rambert is seeing her experimenting with digital traces that communicate something beautiful and incidental to the choreography. Both artists work with science and technology, but always use the presence of real humans as their starting point.

Nothing is as it seems: find out how time and the body defy definition and expect to question the arbitrariness of ‘digital’ itself. Share your own ideas, and put your thoughts into action with live experiments with low-fi tech you can play with.

Leila Johnston

Leila and Cthulu (Image: The Independent)

Since October 2015, Leila has been the first digital artist-in-residence at Rambert, the UK’s leading contemporary dance company.

She works with art and technology, and the fantastical ideas that emerge from them. Since 2013, she has curated and produced a quarterly live show and magazine called Hack Circus, exploring ideas around speculative science, subversive tech, psychology etc in a fun and unique way with a range of experts and performers from the arts and sciences.

Sinead McDonald

Sinead McDonald is a Dublin based artist, photographer and digital media producer. Her research and practice focuses on issues of authorship and narrative in portraits and images of people, and the creation of identity in online and offline spaces. Her work incorporates new technologies; digital production, web based art and physical computing, alongside photography, video, and historical lens-based processes.

Recent trajectories explore the sciences and collaborative practice, and how using different disciplines can help navigate and illuminate difficult and taboo subjects. She is most interested in how technologies and sciences old and new affect and challenge our perceptions, allow us to tell stories, and, ultimately, explore the most human of desires and yearnings.

What are you working on?

A core part of the Salons is giving people a chance to talk about, demo and ask questions of the projects they’re working on at the moment. That means you? How can a room full of curious, intelligent people help you move forward?

Get in touch and let us know if you’d like to harness the power of a many and varied audience to feed into your work.